Trafficked women die at sea: females over 5 times more at risk than males

(The corpse of a migrating person is retrieved from rescue ship Cantabria, Salerno, on Sunday. Getty image)

Reports are just coming in that 26 corpses of Nigerian and sub-Saharan women were retrieved from the Mediterranean at the weekend.
Presumably economic migrants seeking entry to Europe, the dead were aged only 14 to 18. Mass murder is suspected.
A “seemingly endless line of black plastic body bags” , said Agence France-Presse, was landed by the Spanish ship Cantabria when it arrived in Salerno, southern Italy, after a rescue operation that brought in 400 people.
The deceased young women had been among the 64 people on the boat travelling to southern Italy from Warshefana, near Tripoli, when rough weather caused the boat to capsize.
Some of those still living were found in the sea, clinging to the sides of a partly-sunk rubber dinghy.

Picture: Survivors land in Salerno.(Antonio Masiello/Getty Images)

Yesterday, Tuesday, the autopsies were due to begin. The young women were going to be examined to see if they were poisoned and/or raped before they died.




FEMALE ESCAPEES’ DEATH RATE USUALLY 6 TIMES THAT OF MEN

When women are trafficked – not for sex, but just because they want to escape their country – they are five or six times more at risk of dying on their escape boats than are men.
In this case, the dead young women were 40 per cent of those aboard (the total female to male ratio is not yet revealed).

The Guardian reports that Marco Rotunno, spokesperson for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), said 90% of migrant women arrive with bruises and other signs of violence.
“It’s very rare to find a woman who hasn’t been abused, only in exceptional cases, maybe when they are travelling with their husband. But also women travelling alone with their children have been abused.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/07/italy-investigating-deaths-of-nigerian-women-thought-to-have-been-murdered

The reasons why women are so additionally mistreated vary a little according to culture and situations. But from my studies of secondary sources explanations would appear to include:
1. women are regarded as lesser and therefore more disposable
2. women usually have less economic power to bribe their way out of trouble
3. women tend to have been socialised to be less assertive about their rights
4. women may also be less physically strong and have had less experience in fighting off male assailants. (Childhood play fights are useful training but are usually only sanctioned between boys, not girls versus boys).
5. mothers are hampered by being with children they are protecting
6. advanced pregnancy – and miscarrying en route – makes women less physically able to withstand attack or hardship, or simple y to fight for a fair share of scarce food and water
7. murder sometimes follows rape, or even after sex as a bribe. It’s a way to ensure silence. Because those with power in the escape progress (such as boat captains) are invariably male, so the rape victims are usually females.

How can this danger at sea, this horrifically gendered aggression, still be allowed to happen?

NIGERIAN REPORT

A report in Monday's Vanguard, the Nigerian newspaper with the motto ‘Towards a better life for the People’, gave the details:
“The bodies of 26 women were unloaded in a procession of black bags on to the dock of Salerno. The deceased women, believed to be Nigerian in origin, were recovered by the Spanish ship Cantabria as part of operation Sophia, an EU anti-trafficking force. Most of the women, aged in large part between 14 and 18, were drowned when the rubber boat carrying 64 sank on Friday while crossing the Mediterranean.
“The other three victims were collected as part of other operations and transferred the Cantabria as it headed to Salerno to turn over the bodies to the Italian authorities. 375 rescued migrants were also brought to Salerno, originating from sub-Saharan Africa, Gambia, Ghana, Libya, Nigeria, Sudan, and Senegal: 90 of them women, eight of them pregnant; and 54, children.

SEXUAL VIOLENCE ON BOARD?

“An investigation into the deaths of the women has been launched by Salerno prosecutors who believe there is a possibility that sexual violence played a role in the death of these women. Public prosecutor Luca Masini has arranged the external examination of the bodies with emphasises on toxicology and evidence of rape.
“The bodies were frozen onboard the Cantabria in order to preserve evidence that may have been lost during the journey to the coast. Full autopsies are expected to be completed at the Salerno morgue within the week.
“Police have detained 7 people for questioning including two men of Libyan and Egyptian origin who are believed to be the captains of the vessel.

SEX SLAVES WOULD BE BETTER PROTECTED

“Salerno’s prefect Salvatore Malfi has expressed doubts that the women were being trafficked into sex slavery, as he said “the sex trafficking routes are different. Loading women onto a boat is too risky. The traffickers would not do it as they could lose all their ‘goods, ‘as they describe them, in one fell swoop.”
“While women are statistically at more risk during this kind of migration, it is far beyond the 5 to 6 death rate of men to women crossing the Mediterranean. Read more at: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/11/26-nigerian-women-die-mediterranean-sea/”

TINY DISTANCE – HUGE PROBLEM

People wanting to cross that telling bridge from Africa to Europe know the shortest distance by sea is across the Straits of Gibraltar from Point Oliveros to Point Cirse: 8.6 miles(14 km). (A road bridge is being planned.)
‘Illegal’ migrants from southern Africa usually travel via Libya, much further east. Italy has 4,000 mile of coastline and the north-east tip of Tunisia to the west of Sicily, Marsala, near Trapani, is only 325 miles ( 284 km) as the crow flies.
But it’s never that simple, because of sea conditions, and lack of easy places for covert embarkation and disembarkation.
‘Bonafide’ people travelling that route may take ferries from Tunis to Palermo, in north west Sicily. The ten-twelve hour voyage on these large and powerful vessels costs 110 euros in the cheapest period (February).
By contrast, travelling illegally in a rubber dinghy with an inboard motor costs whatever the traffickers can get.
Speeds on a dinghy with a 15 horsepower engine vary between 15-20 miles per hour, but being heavily-laden slows them down. With just two or three people aboard such a boat voyage would take at least 16 hours. These people could have been at sea for several days.
Survivors are just starting to give evidence.

Enslaved women on ships

Adjua (June Carryl) and Dembi (Kimberly Scott) in 'The Liquid Plain'. Photo by Jenny Graham

Today in Britain there are estimated to be 10,000 to 13,000 slaves, mainly women (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30255084). We have a Modern Slavery Bill going through parliament and a Minister for Modern Slavery and Organised Crime, Karen Bradley (pictured)


In these days of increased trafficking (mainly by air) it's telling to look back and see the parallels with the 15-18C slave trade, in which 4-5 million women slaves were transported (about a third of the estimated 12-15 million.)
Not many experts have written about gender on slave ships, let alone written for popular audiences.

The Liquid Plain
But US playwright Naomi Wallace has, in The Liquid Plain, a play that won the 2012 Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play. So far it has only been staged in the US, not here in the UK. (http://www.tcg.org/tools/newplays/details2012a.cfm?ShowID=213)
It's about two runaway slaves, Adjua and Dembi, and the docklands community in late-18C Bristol, Rhode Island, which was a major slave marketplace. With sailors Adjua and Dembi make common cause and plan to return to Africa and 'freedom'.
The play's title comes from a poem by Phillis Wheatley (c1753-1784),who was herself transported from West Africa as a child but became the first African-American to have a book published, and at only twenty.
In her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral she writes:
While for Britannia's distant shore
We sweep the liquid plain,
And with astonished eyes explore
The wide-extended main



Naomi Wallace was inspired to write the play after reading Marcus Rediker’s book The Slave Ship. She refers to the 1791 indictment for murder of slave ship captain James D'Wolf.
He'd wanted the crew of the Polly to heave the nameless woman overboard because he thought she had small pox and would infect the whole crew and thereby cause him to lose his profitable cargo. The sailors refused so,according to seaman John Cranston:
D'Wolf 'himself ran up the Shrowds [he'd had the woman put high up in the mainmast two days earlier] ..then he lash'd her in a Chair & ty'd a mask round her Eyes & Mouth & there was a tackle hooked upon the Slings round the chair when we lowered her down on the larboard side of the Vessel.

That chair, that mask
I know about the story because I've just finished reading Rediker's book. For me the most potent of all many potent images in this history is that chair, and the idea of a captain who was so afraid to touch her skin that he tied her to a chair (presumably she was too ill to move unaided.The sailors themselves were quite keen to get exposure to smallpox and thereby gain immunity).
And then there's the mask, which Cranston said was tied onto the woman so that she could not see what was happening to her so that she would not struggle.
'It was [also]done to prevent her making any Noise that the other Slaves might not hear, lest they should rise.'

Comprehending the full horror of appalling histories, such as slavery and the holocaust, can be hard to do. But the chair and mask somehow helped me take in the horror of a trade that treated human beings in this way. It is similar to the impact on me of seeing the mountains of human hair at Auschwitz: just a commodity.

James D'Wolf (pictured) got away with it, just as so many slave captains got away with their appalling 'business practices' over 244 years. On ship the millions of kidnapped African women were the sexual targets of officers and sometimes crew too. There was rape and there were relationships too.

Regulating women on ships
I started grasping slave women' stories when researching the chapter in my forthcoming book that discusses the regulation - and entertainment - of women passengers in transit. Over the centuries there were matrons, conductresses, escorts, social hostesses - and always natural leaders among the 'human cargo' too.

Rediker retells the stories of two such natural leaders on slave ships: both nicknamed ‘The Boatswain’ they were on the Nightingale in 1769 and the Hudibras in 1787.
On the Hudibras there was also a cultural leader and griot of enslaved women, a ‘songstress ‘ and ‘orator’ who would stand or kneel at the centre of concentric circles of women on the quarterdeck, elders in the outermost circle.
She sang ‘slow airs of a pathetic nature’, and gave orations. Watchers who didn’t speak their language thought these were epic poetry as the women all responded with a chorus at the end of significant sentences.
Seaman William Butterworth, watching, was so moved that he ‘shed tears of involuntary sympathy.’ Rediker reports that at least one captain found the songs of resistance ‘very disagreeable’ and had the singing women flogged so badly their wounds took two to three weeks to heal.

For the women it was, Rediker explains, ‘an effort to retain historical identity in a situation of utter social upheaval … a central element of an active and growing culture of opposition aboard ship.’
It was solidarity and comforting company - something the poor masked murdered woman in the chair so needed.